Medieval Food – Part One

Medieval food consisted of many of the same ingredients as we still use today, with the exception of imported foods which reached Europe later, such as potatoes, tea, coffee, and chocolate. Other imported ingredients, like sugar and certain spices, were available but costly. The main differences between then and now lay in the problems of preserving food over the lean months of winter and early spring, or in transit, as in moving fish inland, this last an imperative due to the Church’s rules about non-meat days.

An aristocratic meal

Another underlying difference was a social one. In the medieval period there was a far greater gulf in eating habits between aristocracy and royalty on the one hand, and the common people on the other. Nowadays the diet across all classes is much closer, although the rich will always have access to exotic foods and wine out of the reach of the less well off. Medieval food consumed by the clergy showed the same social divide as with laymen – the great churchmen (bishops, wealthy abbots and the like) ate like the aristocracy, while a poor parish priest often ate no better, and sometimes worse, than his parishioners.

In my books, I am concerned above all with the common people, so I will not be writing here about the diet of the aristocracy. The descriptions of some medieval feasts leave us reeling, wondering not only how they managed to eat so much, but also why they did not drop dead afterwards. Perhaps that myth about a surfeit of lampreys has a grain of truth in it!

Village Cottage, Town Cottage

It is necessary to bear in mind certain differences between those who lived in the country and those who lived in towns. In my series of Oxford Medieval Mysteries, I depict both the villagers of Leighton-under-Wychwood and the townsfolk of Oxford. The former, obviously, had more land, whether they held it freely or in villein service to a lord. They would have some means of growing the two staple grain crops, wheat (for bread) and barley (for ale), as well as legumes like peas and beans. They would generally have more room for a vegetable garden and an orchard, for chickens and pigs, perhaps a cow or two, a few sheep or goats.

Medieval messuage – still occupied

On the other hand, townsfolk at the time (except the very poor) would generally own or rent a messuage, a small house with a long strip of garden at the back, providing room to grow vegetables, keep hens and a pig, perhaps a bee skep, and to plant a few fruit trees and bushes. There would not often be room for a cow. Flour and barley would need to be bought, as would dairy produce, while the country housewife could make her own butter and cheese. On the other hand, townspeople had access to taverns and inns, and to bakeries and pie shops, even, in the large towns, street vendors of snack foods. The street cry ‘Hot pies, hot pies!’ is an ancient one.

Bread

The fundamental staple medieval food was bread. For the poorest, it was their main source of sustenance. This explains the constant concern at the time to regulate the price and quality of bread. It also explains why drought or blight destroying the wheat and other grain crops was a major disaster, leading to famine and even death amongst the poor. With care, both unground grain and their flours can be kept over winter, so this was a source of medieval food even when it was difficult or expensive to preserve other foods.

There were a number of different types of bread, of which three were common. The cheapest, roughest sort was known as ‘horse bread’. This was not only a term of disparagement, but also an accurate description, as it was fed to horses as well as the very poor. It was made of ground up dried peas and would have been hard and pretty tasteless. However, it would contain protein, so it was not without value.

Barley bread

The next grade up was ‘maslin bread’. The term covers a wide variety of mixed grain bread and was eaten by the majority of the population. It contained a mixture of wheat, rye, barley, oats – whatever grains were available. The greater the proportion of wheat, the higher the status. It produced a brown or dark brown loaf. If it contained a great deal of rye, it would be almost black, like modern rye bread. It’s amusing to think that this kind of mixed grain bread, so despised by the aristocracy at the time, is now regarded as far healthier and tastier than plain white bread. Maslin bread was nourishing and could sustain a hard-working medieval labourer. Being high in fibre as well, it would have been a healthy part of the diet.

A baker’s shop

The finest bread, eaten by the aristocracy, was ‘manchet’. This was a white bread made purely from the best wheat, milled small and then laboriously sieved through a coarse cloth. It would have had little nutritional value, but by eating it the aristocracy made an implied point – with all the rich meat they consumed, they ate bread only as what we would call a ‘side’. It was not, for them, as it was for the rest of the population, the staff of life.

Ale and Beer

Medieval food included ale. Everyone drank it, and the barley from which it was made provided sustenance, so that it was a food as well as a thirst quencher. Most housewives made ale at home on a regular basis (it did not keep well). The main ingredients were boiling water and malt, which was made by sprouting damp barley in a warm place, then roasting it. It was added to the boiling water together with a selection of herbs (every housewife had her personal recipe). Once the ale had brewed, it was strained and stored in a barrel. Some women became ale-wives, brewing ale on a larger scale and selling to their neighbours, a good source of income for a poor woman, perhaps a widow. Even young children and the elderly drank ale, for it was much safer than the often polluted water supply. This did not mean everyone went about drunk. The alcohol content was low, especially in ‘small ale’, the weakest version.

Making ale

Beer made with hops began to filter into England from the Continent, mainly Germany and the Low Countries, in the early 1400s. Its advantage over ale was that the hops acted as a preservative, so it could be kept for longer than ale. At first hops had to be imported, which held back production, but from about the 1420s hops were grown in England, where the main hop growing areas until recent times became Kent and Herefordshire. Of late, imported hops have been cheaper than locally grown ones, but there are signs of a trend back to English hops.

Pottage and Frumenty

After bread, the most important medieval food for ordinary people was pottage. Somewhere between a soup and a stew, it formed the staple item at the midday dinner, breakfast having consisted usually of bread and ale, with perhaps a bit of cheese. A basic pottage consisted of whatever vegetables were to hand at the time, the most popular being onions, leeks, beans, peas, carrots, kale, and cabbage, simmered in water. The simmering would kill off anything unpleasant in the water. The greatest variety of ingredients would be available in the summer, but peas and beans were dried for winter, carrots and onions could be stored. To thicken the mixture and make it more sustaining, barley could be added, either the simple grain, or sprouted barley, made in the same way as for ale. The mixture would be flavoured with garlic and herbs. Simply as a vegetable pottage, it would be nourishing. However, on meat days a little chopped bacon might be added, on fish days, some fish. It would be cooked in a three-legged pot (a ‘kettle’) directly over the fire, or in a large pot hung from a bracket.

A standard cookpot

There were, of course, no potatoes to be found amongst available medieval food. Bread filled the corners as potatoes do today, but there was also frumenty. The basic ingredient was cracked wheat, which could be made at home by pounding the wheat grains briefly with a mortar and pestle. For a savoury frumenty, this cracked wheat was then boiled in broth, with herbs and other flavourings. Served with pottage (or on high days, with meat), it help to stretch the more costly ingredients. For a sweet frumenty, the cracked wheat was parboiled in water, before cooking it again in milk, then stirring in eggs, some dried fruit, and perhaps a little honey.

Milk, Butter, and Cheese

Very little milk was drunk, except by young children, invalids, and the elderly. It was much too valuable as a source of butter and cheese. Moreover, butter and cheese can be preserved, making them even more valuable as a source of protein and fat during the lean times of year. Anyone who kept a cow had a source of these commodities, and housewives were competent cheese and butter makers. They also understood the necessity for scrupulous cleanliness in the production of both products. Traditional knowledge passed down from mother to daughter would have warned against the havoc wreaked by a dirty dairy.

Making cheese

There were three principal grades of cheese, of which the most useful was the hard cheese similar to a modern Cheddar. This took longer to prepare – draining and compressing the curds, salting, curing and turning the large round cheeses – but any woman who had a supply of hard cheese stored in her larder knew that her family would be well provided for. A softer cheese which had not gone through the curing process would be eaten while still fairly new, probably during the abundant milk period in summer, leaving the hard cheese for winter. The very softest cheese, similar to modern cottage cheese, needed to be eaten quickly.

Churning butter

Butter was churned to separate the solid from the liquid, a process which had been known for thousands of years. Once the grains of butter had clumped together in the churn they would be taken out and squeezed, to rid them of any excess liquid, then salted to preserve them as rounds or blocks of butter and stored in the coolest place available. Both the whey from cheese making and the butter milk from butter making would either be drunk or used in cooking.

Meat

Meat did not figure largely as a medieval food, except for the rich. Farmers would sell most of the meat they produced to the aristocracy. The exception for both country and town dwellers was the annual pig, fattened throughout the year on scraps, windfall apples, vegetable peelings, anything and everything which could be spared. Come Michaelmas, the pig would be slaughtered and every last scrap would be used. Preserving the hams and sides of bacon was a trying business, involving brine baths, and repeated rubbing with salt and saltpetre, which must have been agonisingly painful, especially if you had a cut on your hand. Some would also be smoked in the chimney. At the end of all the hard work, however, a medium sized family could get its winter supply of meat from one pig.

Roasting meat

Country dwellers might have mutton from a ram (ewes were kept for lambs and wool). Rabbits could be a bone of contention where an overlord had rights of warren. On most manors, rabbits were farmed, kept in controlled warrens, but rabbits, once established in England, have always escaped, and securing a rabbit for the pot was a common – if sometimes illegal – activity. In theory the lord might claim a right to hares as well, but hares being wild, this was a grey area. Pigeons were also farmed for their meat and eggs, but certainly wild pigeons would have been snared or shot by cottagers.

In the fens of East Anglia, the local people had common rights to the waterfowl, a substantial part of their diet until their land was stolen by developers in the seventeenth century, the background to my novel Flood. Those living in towns had even less opportunity to obtain meat than country dwellers, although there would be licensed butchers, if you could afford their prices. Beef would be beyond most people’s pockets. Venison was for the rich. Sausages sold by butchers might contain almost anything. Better not to ask.

Fish

Because of Church rules regulating medieval food, people were supposed to eat no meat, only vegetables and fish, on two days every week, and every day at certain periods like Lent. This could be a problem for those who lived inland and away from rivers. In some areas the rivers were large enough and the supply of fish and eels ample enough to support local fishermen. Monasteries had fishponds to supply their needs, as did many manor houses.

Stockfish – ugh!

Otherwise, all the fish for the massive number of customers had to come from the sea, where the trade of fisherman was vitally important in supplying this major item of medieval food. In the days before refrigeration and when all transport was slow, the only way to get fish from the coast to the inland consumers was in the form of ‘stockfish’. This unpleasant food was fish salted and dried to rock hardness, and sometimes even imported from as far away as Scandinavia. Before it could be eaten, it had to be soaked in repeated changes of water, to get rid of the salt, then pounded for a long time with a mortar and pestle until it was even remotely edible. That it was revolting even then is borne out by a good many contemporary accounts. On the evidence, a simple vegetable pottage would have been preferable!

Ann, this post confirms your knowledge and understanding of the role food “management” played in all the levels of medieval society particularly in England. I appreciate how effortlessly you are able weave the story of food into your novels (from hunting,farming, reaping, harvesting, gathering, preserving, cooking, inventing recipes, sharing and consuming food for nourishment, enjoyment and healing, even to display prestige and power). Thank you for the added insight to your research.

Thank you, Anne. I just love all the details of real life for ordinary people. By soaking them up, we can identify with our forebears so closely. I’ve been in love with the 14th century ever since reading Chaucer with my wonderful teacher, Charlie Danner, when I was 12. He used to give up his lunch hours to me. I wish he could have lived to see the outcome.

Yes, and appreciate that you can switch on your stove, open your fridge door, turn on a tap for water . . . How did those medieval women also have time to sew the family’s clothes, do beautiful needlework, milk the cow, help in the fields or the shop . . .? Did they ever get any sleep?!

Would a messuage be similar to (or even synonymous with) a burgage plot? In Chipping Campden many of the houses on the High Street still have their burgage plots: very long, quite narrow gardens, many still used for growing fruit and veg for the table.

Yes, Rosalind and Ann. A messuage is the general term, a burgage plot applies specifically to towns. And you can certainly see them in many old towns and villages where the street plan hasn’t been altered by modern development. In Scotland it is called a toft, though I think this may be a more general term for a house plot. Of Viking origin, I think.

Thank you for a very instructive post. It is interesting to see that eating bread with one’s dinner is a leftover from a very long time ago.
I am also grateful for the descriptions of frumenty and pottage, and am looking forward to your next post about food.

Thank you, Elisabeth. One of these days I mean to try making frumenty. I think bulgur wheat must be more or less the same as the cracked wheat used in the Middle Ages, though I think when we buy it now it has been partially parboiled.

Interesting post – I had come across frumenty before, and quite recently, and was meaning to look it up. Now I don’t have to!

In many ways it seems like an ideal diet, assuming one wasn’t living through one of the famine periods.

The importation of food is interesting and I hadn’t realized that it had begun so early. I should have since Rome was importing food from Egypt over 1000 years earlier.

The idea that something so fragile as food was worth importing, as with French onions in the late 19th century, and the affect on the local population is definitely worth a read. What interests me here is that a relatively low value item as Beer was worth importing – I assume it wasn’t low value when importation first started because of its rarity.

Of course, only luxury items tended to be imported in the Middle Ages. Spices had to be imported, since they couldn’t be home-grown, so even pepper was a precious commodity. Sweetening was usually done with honey. Sugar was imported and expensive, until mass production began in the New World and the extraction of beet sugar was developed. Britain being an island and transport being expensive and difficult for foodstuffs, most food had to be produced at home, hence the dependence on good weather, and the risk of famine after a poor harvest.

Incidentally, food imports go back even further than the Romans. In antiquity, Greece – always an agriculturally poor country – imported grain from the richer lands round the Black Sea. It’s likely that the “real” Trojan War was sparked off by this. The grain ships had to pass through the Hellespont, controlled by Troy. The story of Helen’s abduction by Paris is wonderful, but the true story may be much more mundane – security of the grain supply!

Please do include cooking techniques such as they were and recipes if such exist. I know there were books on becoming a ‘good housewife’ at least in the 17th century which I am most concerned with.
Tks…

I’ll be saying more about cooking techniques in next month’s blog, Ann. Perhaps recipes later – I should probably try them myself first! My two Fenland books – Flood and Betrayal – have a lot about life on a farm in the 17th century, including quite a bit about food.

I’m glad you are enjoying it, Diana. It’s a standalone. My other two 17th century novels are the fenland ones – Flood and Betrayal. When I can get around to the research on the legal system during the Cromwellian period, there will be a third. My husband is writing a factual biography of John Swynfen, but there is a huge amount of material in Parliamentary papers and county archives, so it’s an enormous task.

Oh, that’s wonderful, Eliane! Did I ever tell you that we managed to find Mme Billault many years ago in St, Georges sur Cher? She had moved to the next village. We spent a whole day listening to and talking very fast French! We met the people living in your house – a retired cabinet-maker who used the designs of Breton lace in his carving. We had some difficulty identifying your house at first. Jean-Pierre said there was a large pond at the front. In fact, it was quite small! We also had some difficulty explaining to Mme Billaut our connection with Jean-Pierre. Actually, wasn’t she Mlle?

I have just finished reading, one after the other, the Alvarez and then the Oxford series books. Looking forward to your next novels, and hoping Christoval finds love and acceptance… What an awkward situation for her to be in, and I shall be excited to see how you resolve it. Also Nicholas and Lady Emma.

I’m so pleased you’ve been enjoying the two series, David, and I am currently working on the next Oxford book, The Stonemason’s Tale. You might enjoy my other historical novels, while you’re waiting! It’s interesting, when you start researching it, to discover how many women lived disguised as men, often in the army (where you’d think they would soon have been discovered, considering the communal life). Kit could revert to living as a woman, but then she would have to abandon the profession she loves – a hard choice.

Thank you so very much for your interesting post on medieval foods in England. I have fallen in love with both your Oxford Medieval mysteries and the Christoval Alvarez series. You bring the characters and time periods to life in a way that I have only enjoyed in a few other authors. Please tell me you will be having some new works published soon! I’ve been hooked on historical fiction, particularly historical mysteries for at least 50 years and yours are some of the best that I’ve read!

Thank you, Debby – it’s lovely to hear that you are enjoying both Kit’s and Nicholas’s stories. I’m currently at work on the next Oxford book, The Stonemason’s Tale, though daily life does have a habit of getting in the way! And I also hope to write another of Kit’s stories this year. While you’re waiting, you might enjoy the Fenland books, and the two standalones. Back to the masons now.

I did some similar delving into historical foods when I did a blog post on “adulterated” foods over time. I find it fascinating to track the changes in food culture.
I wonder Ann, were foods kept in a strict class structure? For example- did common folks splurge for white bread when there was extra money? Or beef? Etc or would that have been frowned upon as in reaching above their station? Lately I’ve been reading and thinking about the medieval social structure and how rigid many were- whether rich or poor folks seemed to really view “station” as an integral part of identity.
Milking our own cow we provide all our own dairy products and I make all our bread, most often from a leaven that’s kept and fed. I do it for health and quality reasons but sometimes feel a real kinship with housewives of the past! I especially appreciated Margaret (Oxford mysteries) shaping her loaves before going to bed!

Dear Ann: I am grateful you have written with loving detail about women’s work and the lucky household that had a good manager.
Surviving infectious deseases, famin, child birth, early childhood mortality and war, it is a testament to the human spirit and it’s endurance.
I would like to comment about frumenty; it would be related to the tabbuleh sald which is a middle eastern dish consistent of bulgur, a lot of parsley, other vegetables, lemon juice and olive oil.
Thank you for making their world come alive in your books

Yes, I’m particularly interested in ordinary families – all their members, men, women, and children. And in fact dogs, cats, and horses – even hens! I’m so glad you’ve been enjoying my books. I think it is easier to empathise with the ordinary people than with kings and queens, who led such very different lives from ours. There are a number of these grain-based dishes which arose in different parts of the world. Filling as well as nourishing, they could be sweet or savoury, the rather bland taste of the grain being enhanced by small amounts of whatever tasty ingredients were locally available – lemon and olives in Mediterranean countries, honey and berries or onions and meat juices in more northern climes. One way and another, the diet was probably a good deal healthier in those days!